15-year-old Flynn McGarry next big thing says NY Times cover story

He is 15 and on the cover of The New York Times magazine as the next big thing.

Flynn McGarry from Los Angeles has the red hair and freckles of an Irish country kid, but don’t let the freckles fool you.

The New York Times is predicting an awesome future for the kid from the San Fernando Valley.

He has already appeared on the "Tonight Show" with Jimmy Fallon, "NBC Nightly News" and is being touted by the Times as the Justin Bieber of the chef business.

The Times tagged along when he threw a special dinner for some invited guests, including Hollywood stars, top restaurant people and friends and family.

The verdict? In Bieber speak, awesome dude.

“When I’m little I want to be Flynn,” said Max Shapiro a real estate mogul and top amateur chef.Since the birth of the Food Network chefs have become the next big celebrity thing, even Gordon Ramsey helped make kitchen cuisine famous.

Now along comes Flynn McGarry who the Times says has just one overwhelming ambition, to open a three star Michelin restaurant in New York—by age 19.

In the meantime he will shortly have his own cable show, is consulting on a NBC sitcom about a teen chef based on his own life and is consulting with world famous chefs. The world is his oyster.

He began cooking when he told his mom at age 11 she was not such a great cook.

Fortunately, mom Meg McGarry wasn’t offended and supported his cooking ambitions. She bought him cookbooks and showed him internet recipes. McGarry said, “It was after looking at all these cookbooks and going on the internet and looking at all these dishes that I thought, ‘I could achieve that one day.’”

He started cooking just for his family. “I’ve always been very creative, and I wanted to create my own dishes, and I didn’t know too much about it, but I would do variations from ‘French Laundry’ and other cookbooks and would cook them for my family.” He added, “Then, I started liking the creative part of it, and started to cook for more people than just my family.”

He and his mom put his cooking skills to the test by opening Eureka, a dinner club that hosts monthly dinner parties in their home. They built a test kitchen inside his bedroom, just two tables and a couple of gas burners. When he was thirteen his sister went off to college and he moved into her room. His old room was revamped and now boasts induction burners, a 10 foot plating area, and four cooking stations. His mom became the “general manager and reluctant dishwasher,” as she calls herself.

McGarry attends Laurel Springs’ online private school so he can balance education and cooking in his busy schedule. His mother told ABC about her son, “He’s progressing so fast and it’s super overwhelming, but it’s also exciting. You are always proud of your children's’ accomplishments. He showed such passion for this that it was an obvious choice to allow him to do what he loves to do.”